Waterland (8 page)

Jack Parr could not desert his signal-box and level-crossing. So every alternate afternoon, between half-past
two and half-past five, Freddie Parr would make his way to Bill Clay’s marsh-hut. He would hand over the smuggled contents of his sack. Then the two of them would set off round the margins of Wash Fen Mere. While Mary and I nestled in the old windmill, Bill Clay would inspect his springes. If a bird were caught, he would grasp it with a fowler’s firm yet pacifying grip, unsnare it, and with a casual action, as if he were shaking out a tea-towel, wring its neck. Freddie – so he told us – learnt to do likewise. While Mary and I engaged in caresses that were no longer exploratory yet far from unadventurous, three, four, six or more birds, snagged by the neck or leg, would struggle, flap, thrash at approaching footsteps, be stilled by Bill Clay’s horny hand and dispatched. Doubtless, throughout all this Bill Clay talked, and, doubtless, Freddie listened. For Freddie, who was a great blabber-mouth and divulged everything about his father’s dealings with the US Air Force, told us – me, Mary, and the others – much about Bill Clay, which may or may not have been embellished. How, though Bill wasn’t the wisest man in the world, he was certainly the most extraordinary. How he ate water-rats, hypnotized animals; how he was over a hundred; how he knew about the singing swans. How, though he left his cottage and lived alone for weeks on end in his tiny marsh-hut, he was still ‘married’ to Martha Clay and they still ‘did it’ (a remarkable sight it was too) in the open air amongst the reeds.

But I never told Freddie what Mary and I did on summer afternoons.

Freddie Parr. My own brother. You see the shape of my dilemma – and the extent of Mary’s curiosity. And why I was obliged to meet Mary only at selected and predetermined times.

But on July the twenty-sixth, 1943, I was late for my rendezvous. Because – because, in a word, Freddie Parr was dead. And Mary was squatting on top of the windmill emplacement, chin on knees, arms round shins, rocking to and fro in agitation. Scarcely, it’s true, the agitation of the impatient mistress kept waiting by her lover. Because she must have heard by now— Because by now the whole of Hockwell had heard— But Mary’s agitation had another source too. For three weeks now there’d been no misreading the signs. For Mary – if you haven’t guessed already – was pregnant.

Beyond the poplar spinney, I wheeled my bike down the landward side of the Lode bank, let it drop in the long grass, ran the last few paces, because of the steepness, on to level ground, then continued to run, helter-skelter, though I didn’t have to, across the wedge of meadow between bank and windmill.

A simple but edifying scene in which Mary and I embrace to confirm the power of our love in the face of the unforeseen perils of the world and the frailty of flesh, as witness the death of a mutual friend. Not to be. Mary doesn’t unclasp her shins. Because a new bruise on an old bruise …

‘Dead, Mary. Dead. Right there on the tow-path. Dead. I saw him.’

But she cuts me short, lifting her chin from her knees. Dark brown hair. Smoke-blue eyes. She must be braver than me. No wasted emotions. Facts. Facts.

‘Listen – did anyone say anything? Your Dad? The police?’

‘Say?’

‘About how Freddie died.’

‘He drowned.’

Mary bites her lip.

‘About
how
he drowned.’

‘He fell in the river. Couldn’t swim, could he?’

The schoolboy game. Act innocent: you’ll be innocent.
Act ignorant: people will think you don’t know.

But Mary has buried her face in her knees again. She shakes her head. Poplar trees rustle. When she looks up she seems three times older than me, as if she’s become a hard-featured woman with a past. Then I see it’s because something’s gone from her face. Curiosity’s gone.

‘Freddie didn’t fall in. Someone made him fall in. Dick made him fall in.’

‘Mary.’

‘I saw them together last night, down near the footbridge. Freddie was drunk.’

‘But—’

‘Because I told him. Because I thought sooner or later he’ll have to know. I told him. He looked so pleased. Because he thinks— And I said, No, Dick. Not yours. And now I think maybe I should have said Yes. If I’d said Yes, yours— Then he just stared at me, so I had to say something. I said it was Freddie. I told him it was Freddie’s.’

I look at Mary. I’m trying to interpret her words. At the same time I’m thinking: Dick came in last night, at about half-past eight, then left again with something in the pocket of his windcheater.

But all this must look to Mary like disbelief.

‘I said it to protect
you.
Maybe I shouldn’t.’

She lowers her chin, then looks up again with the air of a martyr.

‘It’s true. I told him it was Freddie. Dick killed Freddie Parr because he thought it was him. Which means we’re to blame too.’

The cattle in the meadow have moved round a bend in the banks. The landscape is emptying.

‘How do you know?’

‘Because I know Dick.’

I look at her.

‘I
know Dick.’

‘Perhaps you don’t.’

‘Perhaps I don’t know anything.’

Soft cotton-wool clouds drift across the July sky. We let them drift for a full minute.

‘Mary –
is
it Freddie’s?’

‘No, it’s not Freddie’s.’

Which still keeps me guessing.

‘Is it Dick’s?’

‘It couldn’t have been Dick’s.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because—’ she looks at the ground, ‘—because it was too big.’

‘Too big?’

‘Too big.’

‘To go in?’

‘Yes.’

‘But if it was too – why should he think—?’

‘You know, you know. Because he didn’t know how, in any case. He thought you could have one just by thinking about it. He thought you could have one – just by loving.’

Which still keeps me guessing. Because I don’t believe that if Dick didn’t know how, Mary wouldn’t have taught him. Wasn’t that why Dick made his evening trips to the Lode? To be taught? Why Mary and I took pity? Poor Dick, who wasn’t allowed to be educated … Poor Dick who wanted to know about love.

That – and Mary’s itching curiosity. Which has suddenly gone.

‘It was too big. It wouldn’t— But that’s not the main thing any more now, is it?’

And I’m still guessing after we part on the Lode bank and Mary walks off, without a backward glance, in the direction of the farmhouse. Brown hair; erect carriage; flat land. I don’t know what to guess, what to believe. Superstition’s easy; to know what’s real – that’s hard.

I’m still guessing that same evening, on the river-bank under the willow tree, as I watch Dick tinkering with his motor-bike. (No, he’s not going wooing tonight.) But that same evening too I pick out from the river a beer bottle of curious appearance. I know what was in that bottle. I know where that bottle came from. Guesswork forms conclusions (which don’t quell fear). So Dick comes home from seeing Mary and goes out again with something in the pocket of his windcheater. He waylays Freddie near the footbridge. He knows that Freddie, like his father, never refuses a drink, and though Dick is never known to drink himself, he offers him something special – a beer like no other. With the result that Freddie, who can’t swim anyway, will be in no state to save himself. ‘Freddie want drink?’ They sit on the footbridge. For good measure, before pushing him in, Dick hits him with the empty bottle. On the right temple. Then Dick throws the bottle into the river too. And, like Freddie, the bottle floats downstream …

I take the beer bottle and carry it, unseen, beyond the obstacle of the sluice, meaning to throw it in once more, to float away for good this time, perhaps to float all the way to the sea. But at the last moment something stops me. I thrust it inside my shirt and smuggle it up to my bedroom. And that night, as I go to bed and Dick goes to bed, I do something I’ve never done before. I take the old rusty never-used key to my room from a hook on the wall and lock the door.

8
About the Story-telling Animal

I
KNOW what you feel. I know what you think when you sit in your rows, in attitudes of boredom, listlessness, resentment, forbearance, desultory concentration. I know what all children think when submitted to the regimen of history lessons, to spooned-down doses of the past: ‘But what about Now? Now, we are Now. What about Now?’

Before you a balding quinquagenarian who gabbles about the Ancien Régime, Rousseau, Diderot and the insolvency of the French Crown; behind you, beyond the window, grey winter light, an empty playground, forlorn and misty tower blocks … And around you this stale-smelling classroom in which you are suspended, encaged like animals removed from a natural habitat.

Now. What about Now?

Price pipes up – one of his numerous attempts to subvert the French Revolution, to disrupt disruption – and says: ‘What matters is the here and now.’

But what is this much-adduced Here and Now? What is this indefinable zone between what is past and what is to come; this free and airy present tense in which we are always longing to take flight into the boundless future?

How many times do we enter the Here and Now? How many times does the Here and Now pay us visits? It comes so rarely that it is never what we imagine, and it is the Here and Now that turns out to be the fairy-tale, not History, whose substance is at least for ever determined
and unchangeable. For the Here and Now has more than one face. It was the Here and Now which by the banks of the Hockwell Lode with Mary Metcalf unlocked for me realms of candour and rapture. But it was the Here and Now also which pinioned me with fear when livid-tinted blood, drawn by a boat-hook, appeared on Freddie Parr’s right temple, and again when, after a certain meeting with Mary Metcalf, I hid a beer bottle in my shirt and, retiring to my bedroom, locked the door.

And so often it is precisely these surprise attacks of the Here and Now which, far from launching us into the present tense, which they do, it is true, for a brief and giddy interval, announce that time has taken us prisoner. So that you can be sure that on that July day in 1943 your juvenile history teacher ceased to be a babe. As you may be sure that when during the French Revolution the hair of Marie Antoinette, who once played at Little Bo-Peep and other childish pranks in the gardens of Versailles, turned, in a single coach journey from Varennes to Paris, white as a fleece, she was aware not only of the Here and Now but that History had engulfed her.

Yet the Here and Now, which brings both joy and terror, comes but rarely – does not come even when we call it. That’s the way it is: life includes a lot of empty space. We are one-tenth living tissue, nine-tenths water; life is one-tenth Here and Now, nine-tenths a history lesson. For most of the time the Here and Now is neither now nor here.

What do you do when reality is an empty space? You can make things happen – and conjure up, with all the risks, a little token urgency; you can drink and be merry and forget what your sober mind tells you. Or, like the Cricks who out of their watery toils could always dredge up a tale or two, you can tell stories.

My becoming a history teacher can be directly ascribed to the stories which my mother told me as a child, when, like most children, I was afraid of the dark. For though my
mother was not a Crick, she had the story-telling knack in no small measure, and, in any case, as I did not then know – as only later historical researches would reveal – she had cause of her own to be no stranger to fairy-tales.

My earliest acquaintance with history was thus, in a form issuing from my mother’s lips, inseparable from her other bedtime make-believe: how Alfred burnt the cakes, how Canute commanded the waves, how King Charles hid in an oak tree – as if history were a pleasing invention. And even as a schoolboy, when introduced to history as an object of study, when nursing indeed an unfledged lifetime’s passion, it was still the fabulous aura of history that lured me, and I believed, perhaps like you, that history was a myth. Until a series of encounters with the Here and Now gave a sudden pointedness to my studies. Until the Here and Now, gripping me by the arm, slapping my face and telling me to take a good look at the mess I was in, informed me that history was no invention but indeed existed – and I had become part of it.

So I shouldered my Subject. So I began to look into history – not only the well-thumbed history of the wide world but also, indeed with particular zeal, the history of my Fenland forebears. So I began to demand of history an Explanation. Only to uncover in this dedicated search more mysteries, more fantasticalities, more wonders and grounds for astonishment than I started with; only to conclude forty years later – notwithstanding a devotion to the usefulness, to the educative power of my chosen discipline – that history is a yarn. And can I deny that what I wanted all along was not some golden nugget that history would at last yield up, but History itself: the Grand Narrative, the filler of vacuums, the dispeller of fears of the dark?

Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man – let me offer you a definition – is the story-telling animal.
Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting markerbuoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories, he has to keep on making them up. As long as there’s a story, it’s all right. Even in his last moments, it’s said, in the split second of a fatal fall – or when he’s about to drown – he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.